The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world, with a prize of $50,000 bestowed annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. It was created to celebrate the 81 years of discerning, thoughtful criticism Kirkus Reviews has contributed to both the publishing industry and readers at large. Books that earned the Kirkus Star with publication dates between November 1, 2014, and October 31, 2015, are automatically nominated for the 2015 Kirkus Prize, and the winners will be selected on October 23, 2015, by an esteemed panel composed of nationally respected writers and highly regarded booksellers, librarians and Kirkus critics.

"More a deliberately constructed intellectual exercise on the ambiguities of heroism than a story with flesh and blood characters—and, surprising for this author, spelled out as such—this will disappoint readers hoping for another Tenderness. (Fiction. 12-15)"

Cormier (Tenderness, 1997, etc.) again poses a set of chewy moral dilemmas, but he develops them within a sketchy plot more suited to the short-story form.
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A serial killer; an aging cop with a hunch; an impulsive 15-year-old runaway: Three familiar characters are spun by a master of suspense into another disturbing study in emotional dysfunction.
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"The author goes easier on his characters (and readers) than in some of his books (Tunes for Bears to Dance To, 1992, etc.), but still poses an array of tough moral choices, offering neither clear answers nor a neat ending. (Fiction. 12+)"

Cormier again takes on The Big Themes—love and hate, death, sin, guilt and expiation—in this riveting tale of a son increasingly involved in his father's tragedy.
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"The author expertly twists both plot and characters in this shocking study of the effects of random violence; as usual for Cormier, failure and defeat are deeply felt, while victories, at best, are costly and ambiguous. (Fiction. YA)"

By the author of The Chocolate War (1974) and other YA fiction renowned for its fiercely astringent posing of tough questions, a gentler story for younger children, depicting a lonely 11-year-old's qualms and wonderment concerning her neighbors' Catholicism.
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"Setting, structure, and characters are woven together in shifting, complex patterns as Paul finds out that the Fade is a terrible burden, capable of doing more harm than good: Cormier has once again produced a profoundly disturbing, finely crafted gem that's hard, cold, and brilliant."

Young Paul Moreaux discovers that he's inherited the ability to disappear at will, and what might have been at least partly a blessing in the hands of another author is in Cormier's hands an unalloyed curse.
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"But, for the many fans of The Chocolate War: another dark, intense melodrama—with another downbeat, Evil-Goes-On ending."

It's been over ten years since The Chocolate War (1974), but the action in this sequel takes place only a few months after the original ugly doings at Trinity High—a boys' day school in drab mid-New England.
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"All in all the novel hasn't the consuming, focused tension of previous Cormier YAs, but that is not to deny its crisp, sure craftsmanship, suggestive applications, and holding power."

"The bumblebee flies anyway"—and so too the life-sized model car, which Barney finds and dismantles in a nearby junkyard to reassemble in the attic, will ride. . . straight off the roof of The Complex, the institution where terminally ill teens are receiving experimental treatment.
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"Cormier does not so much refuse to mourn as refuse to compromise—which his merciless choice of victims and his tight-lipped projection of the Army side makes smashingly clear."

A tough, double-barreled thriller which immerses readers, alternately, in the unexplained torment of young Ben Marchand and his father, who await each other in a prep school dorm, and in the tension aboard a hijacked school bus diverted to a rickety unused bridge.
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"The denouement seals the accelerating dread, with recollections of gentle domesticity and even some high school humor adding a mite more candle power to light this bike-ride through a twilight zone."

A competent, free-form little chiller that pedals you into the implausible before you can say "Cheese it! the Mafia!"—a Mafia whose sinister masterminds, along with the CIA, can fracture a young boy's life.
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"Mature young readers will respect the uncompromising ending that dares disturb the upbeat universe of juvenile books."

Vicious and violent mob cruelty in a boy's prep school is not a new theme but Cormier makes it compellingly immediate in this novel of Trinity High, a boys' day school with the close, concentrated, self-contained atmosphere of a boarding school, temporarily headed by the venomous, manipulating Brother Leon and unofficially run by power-obsessed senior Archie Costello, the ingeniously audacious "assigner" for a secret organization called the Vigils.
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